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Tag: Editing View

When I first taught myself HTML, it was in the 1990s, and not only has the technology advanced, but the philosophy behind Web-design has also changed. The original philosophy was, that the Web-page should only contain the information, and that each Web-browser should define in what style that information should be displayed. But of course, when Cascading Style-Sheets were invented – which in today’s laconic vocabulary are just referred to as “Styles” – they represented a full reversal of that philosophy, since by nature, they control the very appearance of the page, from the server.

My own knowledge of HTML has been somewhat limited. I’ve bought cuspy books about ‘CSS’ as well as about ‘JQuery’, but have never made the effort to read each book from beginning to end. I mainly focused on what some key concepts are, in HTML5 and CSS.

Well recently I’ve become interested in HTML5 and CSS again, and have found, that to buy the Basic license of a WYSIWYG-editor named “BlueGriffon“, proved informative. I do have access to some open-source HTML editors, but find that even if they come as a WYSIWIG-editor, they mainly tend to produce static pages, very similar to what Web-masters were already creating in the 1990s. In the open-source domain, maybe a better example would be “SeaMonkey“. Beyond that, ‘KompoZer‘ can no longer be made to run on up-to-date 64-bit systems, and while “BlueFish”, a pronouncedly KDE-centric solution available from the package-manager, does offer advanced capabilities, it only does so in the form of an IDE.

In the past, when I was writing about hardware-accelerated graphics – i.e., graphics rendered by the GPU – such as in this article, I chose the phrasing, according to which the Fragment Shader eventually computes the color-values of pixels ‘to be sent to the screen’. I felt that this over-simplification could make my topics a bit easier to understand at the time.

A detail which I had deliberately left out, was that the rendering target may not be the screen in any given context. What happens is that memory-allocation, even the allocation of graphics-memory, is still carried out by the CPU, not the GPU. And ‘a shader’ is just another way to say ‘a GPU program’. In the case of a “Fragment Shader”, what this GPU program does can be visualized better as shading, whereas in the case of a “Vertex Shader”, it just consists of computations that affect coordinates, and may therefore be referred to just as easily as ‘a Vertex Program’. Separately, there exists the graphics-card extension, that allows for the language to be the ARB-language, which may also be referred to as defining a Vertex Program. ( :4 )

The CPU sets up the context within which the shader is supposed to run, and one of the elements of this context, is to set up a buffer, to which the given, Fragment Shader is to render its pixels. The CPU sets this up, as much as it sets up 2D texture images, from which the shader fetches texels.

The rendering target of a given shader-instance may be, ‘what the user finally sees on his display’, or it may not. Under OpenGL, the rendering target could just be a Framebuffer Object (an ‘FBO’), which has also been set up by the CPU as an available texture-image, from which another shader-instance samples texels. The result of that would be Render To Texture (‘RTT’).